Advocating a Virtuous Voluntaryism

Obama is NOT the Worst President in this Nation’s History

You keep hearing this (that Obama is the worst president in history and therefore if we don’t vote for the so-called alternative we are all going to go up in flames along with our great republic), mainly from conservatives (there still are some that refuse to give in!) who don’t like Romney but convince themselves that this is a good reason to vote for him. Well, I am here to cry “foul!” There are several presidents much worse than Obama, not just from a libertarian perspective, but from a conservative perspective (though their criticisms would be different, except on economic policies, at least on the surface), but conservatives have short memories and are easily distracted by rhetoric, coming from both the persons in question and the court historians of latter days. For now, I will call attention to just three presidents many orders of magnitude worse than Barack Obama, and then apply the rules that make these men conservative heroes, to their mortal foe, our current president. To start, here is a response I gave to a RON PAUL SUPPORTER saying he was going to vote for Romney now that Paul was not the nominee.

Sorry, but I can think of worse presidents. Like the guy responsible for the deaths of 600,000[1] of his fellow Americans, a draft,[2] suppression of free speech, indefinite detention, and acts of terrorism against civilians.[3] Or the guy who got us into a world war that had nothing to do with us, leading to a stronger Federal Reserve,[4] a new military-industrial complex, two depressions (1920-1921 and 1929-1945),[5] the blatant suppression of free speech, involuntary servitude in the form of a draft, and the set of entangling alliances that got us into another world war.[6] Or the guy who prolonged a depression by a factor of ten,[7] aided and abetted one of the worst dictators in history,[8] whose arrogance and machinations dragged us into a world war,[9] who re-instituted the draft, got the ball rolling on nuclear weapons, detained an entire ethnic demographic on the pretext of security,[10] and sold Eastern Europe and parts of Eastern Asia to the Soviets and Red Chinese for more than a generation.[11] Obama doesn’t hold a candle to Lincoln, Wilson, or Roosevelt.

So why is it that people think he is the worst president? I realize that he is an awful president, but unless you have a very poor knowledge of history and/or are easily led astray, where do you get off saying he is the worst? That’s not only wrong by probably their own standards were they actually to apply them instead of getting all emotional at the first sign of wrongdoing, its borderline offensive.

So what are these criticisms of Obama that conservatives have but not necessarily libertarians don’t necessarily? Most conservatives criticize Obama for being too weak on national security and the borders. What they don’t realize is that Obama has actually been tougher on illegal immigrants than amnesty Bush ever was. And though his rhetoric would lead one to think otherwise, he has carried on the “War on Terror” and the surveillance state like its a job he was born for. But people bring up red herrings like Fast and Furious or the 30,000 surge when the generals wanted 40,000.

But Fast and Furious had nothing to do with an open-borders immigration policy. My best estimation was that it was intended to increase border violence to justify gun control and a further crackdown on border crossing. How conspiratorial of me! Sorry but I don’t buy the idea simply that “mistakes were made.” And crossing the border is not just harder for illegal immigrants (which is a useless blanket term) but for US citizens as well!

And the troop surge should have been at 0 (and yet Obama is called weak on defense because he only sent in 30,000!) And then we should have gotten out. “We just marched in, we can just march out.” Did it really take 30,000 extra troops to find Osama and put a cap in him? No. And the fact that it took ten years is disgraceful as well. If that was really what going to Afghanistan was ever really about Bush would have gotten him in six months. And Obama in three because he at least had someone’s “legacy” to build off of. “Our” money was not worthless, “our” troops were not ill-prepared, and “our” intelligence agencies were not incompetent. And don’t get me started on toppling Gaddafi and drone warfare and the assassination of US citizens and the National Defense Authorization Act.

Do people seriously think these are things Bush wouldn’t have done (I refer here more to the national defense policies than the immigration ones) if he could have? And the only reason he couldn’t have, would have been the backlash coming from the left that is now blindly in the tank for Obama! And would the right say Bush was weak on defense for doing them? Hell no! Because he would have used fancy rhetoric about freedom and democracy and justice. Not only would he not be deemed weak, he would be lavished with praise. So why does Obama seem so weak on these pet “conservative” issues? The answer, as you have no doubt discerned by now, is rhetoric. It’s all perception. If you are casting your vote on that instead of reality, you are in fact wasting your vote, not those of us who plan on voting for neither Romney nor Obama.

Most conservatives today idolize Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt. If not always for their economic policies, absolutely for their national defense policies or flag-wrapped rhetoric! But the policies are more or less the same as Obama’s, or at least in the same vein. So why don’t they just vote for Obama? Because it’s his non-flag-wrapped rhetoric that scares them, not his actual policies which they mischaracterize as somehow radical. But they are actually quite normal, just accentuated by his statements and the faux reaction coming from the establishment right.

By normal, I do not mean that they are in-line with how our nation prior to Obama’s inauguration was perceived by conservatives. What I mean is in-line with actual reality. And what is this reality? That every president from Hoover and Roosevelt, on up through Eisenhower and Kennedy, Carter and Reagan, and Bush and Obama has simply maintained the status quo, making no attempts to change it or utterly failing in their attempts to do so because they were not so courageous and upright and insightful as they made themselves out to be or once were.

If Obama had an R next to his name and was as eloquently conservative in his demagoguery as Newt Gingrich is most conservatives would support him. No questions asked. So much for vetting! For proof of this I give you Mitt Romney. And once the rhetoric is forgotten, give it 50 to 100 years, “conservatives” will idolize Obama too. The same thing has already happened right before our very eyes in the instances of the presidents I cited above.

1: That’s the traditional statistic. It has been revised upward to 850,000, but I digress. back

2: Bullying the Supreme Court, exiling of opponents, Union-busting, racism, a false flag attack, and maybe even voter fraud should be added to Lincoln’s list. Not to mention several forms of corruption and public-rent seeking long before having reached the highest office of the land. back

3: When ending slavery and cruelty is your excuse for enslaving and maiming others, you know there is something else that is afoot. back

4: Via the Liberty Bond Act, which fundamentally amended the relatively innocuous original charter; as well as exchange imbalances resulting from the different levels of inflation each nation suffered as a result of World War One, which resulted in an end to the gold standard that finally culminated with the 1971 Nixon Shock. back

5: These in fact have the same root, the fiscal and monetary policies around the world during and resulting from World War One. back

6: World War Two is often laughingly blamed on so-called isolationists. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was the interventionists during World War One and their subsequent failures (sometimes inadvertent, sometimes intentional) to seek peace and offer forgiveness after the war. back

7: The Depression of 1920-1921 only lasted about 18 months whereas the one from 1930 to 1945 arguably lasted at least 180 months. There is nothing in the fundamentals of their respective beginnings to suggest one should have dwarfed the other. The differences were the government reactions and the policies that ensued. However, part of the blame does rest on Herbert Hoover‘s head. back

9: FDR’s State Department refused to negotiate with the Japanese whom “we” had aggressed against and ultimately neglected to communicate with the lower echelons of the Defense Department about the threat that was posed. Pearl Harbor is not so shocking. back

10: Japanese Americans. There were a few exceptions of course. But these were made up for by the Italian-Americans and German-Americans that were detained separately. Oh, haven’t you heard? I guess the reverse-racist court historians forgot to tell you that white people have been mistreated in this nations past too! back

11: The Yalta and Potsdam Accords, as well as the occupation of former Japanese conquests by the USSR and soon-to-be Communist China. And this in spite of the fact that the pretext for the war, at least on Britain’s part (I said pretext; the reason, however, has more to do with Britain’s superiority complex, which happens to have been the same thing the Kaiser in World War One and Hitler in World War Two were suffering from; of course, a steady, sustained erosion of their century-and-a-half-or-so world hegemon status didn’t help the matter), was to “liberate” many of these regions! back

Absolutely. I wanted to keep it simple, because I wanted people to know who I was talking about without necessarily having to say their names. Although I did say their names anyways. I have been planning a post or posts with my take on several of the presidents. Maybe the top ten baddies and the top ten goodies or something.